Sixty years ago this month, I packed my bags for the Republican National Convention. We would make some history that week. And you will read it here for the first time.

Picky readers will have put together for themselves the first part of the story: The 1964 presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater was, from front to back, a production of National Review.

Goldwater was an attractive, ruggedly Western, occasionally irascible, widely unknown senator from Arizona. He first came to national attention with the publication of his political manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, which became the best-selling campaign book of all time. The book was, ideologically speaking, white-hot, and it was written with a throbbing narrative drive. It conferred upon Barry Goldwater a sharply etched national persona. (Many intellectually pretentious young conservatives, myself included, would prefer to have said that we had been drawn to the cause after reading Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, but the galvanizing force for many of us was in fact Conscience.)

The author of that timely and powerful book was not Barry Goldwater but Brent Bozell, National Review’s Washington bureau chief. And as time would in later years reveal, the politics of the book were more Brent’s than Barry’s.

Begin sidebar: Almost 30 years later, I came to know Barry Goldwater well. I as a Reagan appointee, and he as a Clinton appointee, were assigned to assess and report on a high-security military facility. The assignment involved long days, long plane rides, and a sundown cocktail or two. Barry Goldwater was a good man, a patriot, honest to a fault. I asked him about Conscience one night, and he answered in his laconic, man’s-man way: “Well, I read the book. I even agreed with parts of it.” End sidebar.

The delegate hunting and selection process was run by a pop-up group called the Draft Goldwater Committee (which was never approved, but never explicitly disavowed by the proposed candidate). That committee was the brainchild of two men, William Rusher, the publisher of National Review, and his longtime collaborator, F. Clifton White, a lapsed and low-keyed academician from upstate New York. Rusher was the ideological force, White the political mechanic. Clif’s campaign notebooks, the most important of them intracranial, taxonomized every delegate, every alternate, as saint, sinner or savable.

I, having succeeded Bozell, was the Washington bureau chief. My file, on a good week, bore an uncanny resemblance to the line taken in subsequent days by Goldwater’s D.C. office.

The most visible, audible, and charismatic public advocate for Barry Goldwater was William F. Buckley Jr., editor of National Review. He wrote constantly. He spoke everywhere. He debated everybody. He made arguments for Goldwater that even Goldwater found persuasive.

By the time we arrived in San Francisco, our roles had become well-defined. From a trailer parked outside the old Cow Palace, Clif White ran the floor operation, orchestrating the hundreds of high-touch maneuvers required at a packed and contested convention. Rusher was on call around the clock: Whenever White picked up signs of delegation wobble, he would dispatch Rusher for a back-straightening breakfast meeting, or a hotel mini-rally, or the kind of chest-to-chest confrontation from which White himself demurred. Rusher was a blur in motion. With the blandishments of the Rockefeller machine an omnipresent threat, delegation wobbles broke out repeatedly.

Buckley played Buckley, hosting a stream of bigfoot journalists, heavy-hitting donors, dubious foreign dignitaries, and big-state delegates. Bill persuaded many of them to suspend their disbelief in the controversial candidacy of Barry Goldwater.

My role was to put out a daily newspaper. Why? For the reason anybody puts out a daily newspaper. To persuade his community to see the world the way he does. My friend Jim McFadden, NR’s associate publisher, probably had the tougher job. Mac had to print the newspaper in a strange city and deliver it within a few hours to the 5,000 people we wanted to see the world as we did.

I had two editorial assistants, both hired from congenial organizations in northern California. They washed out in the first 36 hours. No shame on them. Eighteen-hour workdays at peasant wages is not for everybody. But in addition to Mac, who signed on immediately as a writer-editor, I had a freelance reporter hired by Bill. (A clarification, perhaps already overdue: Bill Buckley was known as “Bill.” Bill Rusher was known as “Rusher.”) I saw the man’s name on the manifest — John Dos Passos — and assumed that it would be the great man’s grandson. Nope. It was the great man himself.

Begin sidebar: When I got to Yale in 1958, John Dos Passos was still esteemed as one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, right up there with Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and the rest. By the time I left Yale in 1962, Dos Passos was well on his way to being regarded as a wannabe who couldn’t write a lick. He had been a fellow travelling pro-Communist in the Thirties — probably never much of an activist — but he inched rightward after each Soviet atrocity and, by the Fifties, he had become openly anti-Communist. Yale’s world-renowned Department of English then committed a literary mugging. (And the appalling episode became a seismic event on my own long road from muddled moderate Republicanism to the anti-Communist right.) End Sidebar.

Dos, as he insisted we call him, pitched in. When he reported for duty Monday morning, he asked what I needed. The fuzzy-cheeked editor told the bald, crinkley-eyed novelist that he needed 1,200 words of color reporting from the floor. No later than 3 p.m.

At 2:55 p.m., Dos returned, with a fistful of neatly typed yellow foolscap, saying, “I hope this works for you, Boss.” I read it eagerly and told him that I thought he might have a future as a writer. I then invited my new colleague, temporarily homeless in an overbooked city, to use the extra bed in my rooming house. We became roommates. (A lingering image from those early mornings: Dos, me, and two or three other guys standing around in our undershorts, toothbrush and razor in hand, waiting for the floor’s one small bathroom to clear. I could never persuade Dos to jump the line.)

Sometime late Wednesday, we got the call from Clif in the trailer. “We’ve got it! Switch to CBS. I’m going to leak it to Walter.” Excuse, please, but my notes are fuzzy on the point as to exactly which state in the roll call it would be, but Clif, of course, had it right that it would put Barry over the top.

Clif White had his saints in a row. We had pulled the damned thing off! I collected Dos and headed off to Bill’s place at the Saint Francis Hotel, where the good times would now commence to roll.

When we walked into Bill’s suite, there were three men slumped across the sofas, all of them looking as if they had just lost the rent money in a poker game. Bill, Mac, and Rusher. I clapped my hands and said something stupid like, “Let’s get this party started.” Mac got up and waved me into the other room, where he reported that Bill had just received a call from New York with the news that his kid sister Maureen had dropped dead of an embolism. No! Feisty, flirty Maureen? The mother of a Buckley-sized brood of young children? No! We all loved Maureen. Just no, dammit!

I walked back into the other room and put my hand on Bill’s shoulder. He started to sob. We sat quietly for a long while, the five of us, most of us drinking immoderately from the open bar that had been set up for the party that night. Finally, somebody said that we had some decisions to make, and we turned to the tasks at hand. Mac would wave off the partygoers set to arrive in an hour or two. Bill would catch the first plane back to New York. Rusher would pick up Bill’s speaking engagements, and I would cover for Rusher at the state delegation wrap events. The world would go on.

The next night, Thursday, I commandeered one of our precious floor passes and made my way into the great hall. No more desk duty for me. I wanted to experience Barry’s acceptance speech up close and personal.

He seemed to get off to a good start. He had the house rocking, and my guess was that it was working at home, too. But then he bellowed that famous couplet from Harry Jaffa, the original Claremonster, with the line about extremism being no vice. The press had been handed its lede. Bam! Barry Goldwater was going to run for president as . . . an extremist. Poof! Barry’s campaign was over before it began. I should note that Barry Goldwater never had an identifiable path to victory in November. But it was unwise to snuff out the possibilities so prematurely.

The nomination of Barry Goldwater for president was widely, universally, mordantly, redundantly reported. The other big story of that convention — the story with quite possibly more lasting, and certainly more inspiring, lessons for the future — went ignored and unreported. That was the story of how a 38-year-old editor of a little magazine had managed to take over one of the world’s great political parties. Many outlets had part of the story, wisps of it, and they sought interviews with Bill to fill in the blanks, to nail it: The big American networks, the newsweeklies, the great metro papers, mega-byline writers including Theodore H. White. Bill agreed to speak with them about his own role but — and here was the Buckley grace note — only on the condition that they wait until Barry had accepted his nomination and flown out of town on the first leg of his campaign. I booked interviews back to back from late Friday through most of Saturday.

In Bill’s absence, those interviews were never conducted. Those stories were never published or broadcasted. Those reports were never included in the central file of the era. And as any historian will tell you, if the paper is not in the file, the event never really happened.

One final indignity awaited us. By late Friday, the Cow Palace was becoming a ghost town. The delegates had checked out of their hotels and were on their way home, the media types had flown out to intersect with the candidate along the campaign trail. Dos stayed late and, as he was helping me clean out our little office, we had a visitor. He was a man of middle years, buzz-cut and officious, his chest aflutter with an array of impressive credentials. In the mini-verse of Goldwater World, he was, clearly, a Very Important Person:

He asked, “Is this National Review?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’s Buckley?”

“He’s back in New York.”

“Where’s Rusher?”

“He’s on a plane.”

“And who would you two be?”

“I’m Freeman, editor of National Review Daily, and that’s my reporter, John Dos Passos.” (God, I loved saying that.)

“I wanted to be sure you knew that you were out now. Thanks for what you did.” And with that, the officious official turned and marched back down the corridor.

Well, that was a relief. We bumbling amateurs had just been dismissed. The professionals had arrived, and they would soon be showing us how to run a real campaign.

I looked around and said, “I’m sorry, Dos. I know you took this gig for the job security.”

He rewarded my jape with the crinkley-eyed grin. “There’s nothing to worry about here. I’ve been pushed around by bigger people.”

And so he had been. John Dos Passos had pledged his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to the anti-Communist cause. And he had paid off that pledge in full.