Hello and welcome to Whistlestop, a podcast of campaign curiosities.

I'm John Dickerson, host of Face the Nation.

Was Barry Goldwater mentally unstable? Would his presidency have ushered in a nuclear

holocaust? The 2016 campaign conversation is soaked with talk of Donald Trump's narcissism and speculation about how it overwhelms his circuitry.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater's opponents also said the GOP nominee was mentally on the tilt.

They drew a direct line between the turmoil in his skull and the survival of the nation.

Ten, nine, eight, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1, 0.

These are the stakes.

If you opened your New York Times newspaper in the summer of 1964,

as any right thinking person would,

you would see a full page ad that read,

Is Barry Goldwater psychologically fit to be president of the United States?

It was an ad for something called Fact Magazine, which purported to tell special truths the corporate

press wasn't telling you, and one of those truths was that Goldwater was clinically unfit for the presidency.

Here's a little more from that ad.

1,846 psychiatrists answer this question in the next issue of Fact magazine. What does

psychiatrists think of Goldwater's fitness to keep his fingers on the atomic

trigger of his tendency to view issues and people from extremes as either all good or all bad of his veneration of the military,

his aversion to compromise, his mistrust of strangers, and the impulsive statements he later modifies or denies.

That ad and the issue that Fact Magazine produced led to a $2 million lawsuit by Goldwater, which helped set the precedent about what you could say and what you could not say about presidential candidates.

But perhaps the most important difference between then and now is that history gives us some

insight into a quality that Goldwater had and which Donald Trump has yet to really

...