"Our Godfather-

"Our Barry-Barry-Goldwater!"

Goldwater stood up to the wild welcome modestly; he read his speech well, talking about big government and "the problems of middle management," or the power exercised by the bureaucratic machinery through which legislation must pass as it is executed. "What is the greatest single threat to our freedom?... The impossibility of governments to restrain the growth of bureaucratic government. Every single government that has fallen has fallen because of the welfare state that follows bureaucratic government."

The Young Americans for Freedom made an award to Goldwater after his speech, naming him "Man of the Decade" (along with William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagon, who didn't attend the convention) and giving him a book of letters from well-wishers and a portrait of himself. The portrait, painted from a photograph taken just after he had returned from a fishing trip, shows the familiar face topped by a skipper's cap and looking unusually rugged under several day's growth of beard.

A BORTION and population control were the issues that brought on some of the strongest disagreements among the conservatives during a Friday panel discussion. In an earlier speech, Dr. Charles Rice had hit the abortion question hard, and received a standing ovation from his audience for the attack. This government has appointed a commission on population control headed by John D. Rockefeller III. This commission is promoting, for anywhere in the country, abortion on demand....

"My point is this:... In Japan there has been a regime of easy abortion.... 50 million people have been killed. If you don't believe that a child in the womb is a human being, at least give him the benefit of the doubt....

"If you kill an innocent human being when the life of another human is not at stake, you take that child's life.... The basic principle behind this movement is exactly the same principle underlying the Nazi extermination of the Jews.... I can't conceive of anyone voting for anybody anywhere who supports legislation that would authorize the killing of innocent children."

Dr. William Oliver Martin, a University of Rhode Island philosophy professor, supported the anti-abortion stand during the Friday discussion; Frank Meyer, a scholarly conservative theorist and a senior editor of the National Review, politely contradicted him. Meyer spoke of a woman's right to her own body and to its use, and argued that the question was not one of the sanctity of human life as it might be for Buddhists, but one of the sanctity of the human soul. "I do not regard abortion as murder at an early stage. If it is not murder, thenit is tyranny to restrict it. If it is murder, then it should not be allowed-but no one has sent an abortionist to the electric chair for murder."

A minority of the audience applauded this point. A Yaffer in the back of the hall objected: "I believe that abortion at any time is the taking of innocent human life."

Meyer countered, "Do you believe in capital punishment for abortionists and consenting mothers?"

"I'd consider it."

A few listeners brought up over-population. "In New York City," one explained, "people are literally going crazy from the effects of overcrowding." As badge-wearing conservatives, they could argue for legal abortion, sex education, and voluntary population control from the libertarian position, an ideology of the Right that, in its insistence of complete personal freedom, has contributed to the sentiments against big government and federal intervention in a free economy.

One of the panelists, Dr. George C. Roche, had summed up this position in another context during an earlier speech. "It may be that coercive political power can best serve the individual by stepping aside and letting the sun shine through." Ayn Rand's objectives grew out of the libertarian point of view; though nobody at the convention went openly to that extreme, the ultimate result of libertarianism is, logically, anarchism.

AT A cafeteria luncheon, Washington's voice of Southern Conservatism, Strom Thurmond, delivered a speech on campus and urban riots. Some University of Hartford students sat quietly and inconspicuously in the audience; there were not as many of them actively following the events of the convention as there had been the day before. It seemed strange that Thurmond could come to Hartford and deliver the kind of speech that reaches the Northeast only on news reports; it seemed geographically out of place, as though the deep-South words and the New England air ought not to mix.

Before going into his explanations for "The Urban Riot: Who Makes Them, and Why," he urged the Young Americans to "pay close attention to the work of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee so that you can keep abreast of subversive activity in the United States." Then Thurmond launched into his description of the origins of urban rioting. "Violence is started by criminals, deviants, and subversives," who work to involve others in riots. "The job of the riot maker... is to alienate his target group. In Marxist jargon, this is called 'developing class consciousness.'"