“They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that's what happened.”

This appears to be a variant of a widely disseminated Republican joke with no published attribution of its authorship to Buckley.
Mark Hatfield, as quoted in The Condition of Republicanism (1968) by Nick Thimmesch, p. 65
They told me if I voted for Goldwater we'd be at war in Vietnam in six months — and I did and we were.
Anonymous voter, as quoted in It All Comes Back to Me Now : Character Portraits from the "Golden Apple" (2001) by William O'Shaughnessy, p. 85
Buckley did say this on the Firing Line episode "Vietnam: Pull Out? Stay In? Escalate?" According to the transcript here http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/programView2.php?programID=22, he says "...if someone told me that if I voted for Goldwater, we would escalate the war, I did and we have."
Misattributed
Variant: They told me if I voted for Goldwater in 1964, that we'd have more war and higher prices. Well, I did, and we do.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that's wh…" by William F. Buckley Jr.?
William F. Buckley Jr. photo
William F. Buckley Jr. 43
American conservative author and commentator 1925–2008

Related quotes

John Wilkes photo
Walter Cronkite photo

“I simply told people what I thought about the state of the war in Vietnam,and it was that we better get out of this.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Free the Airwaves! (2002)

Patrick Buchanan photo
Gertrude Breslau Hunt photo
Fethullah Gülen photo

“I am quite sure that if most of the voters that voted Yes to Lisbon knew the facts of what was in the Treaty they would have voted No.”

Declan Ganley (1968) Irish businessman, entrepreneur, and activist

Source: The Fight for Democracy – The Libertas Voice in Europe. (2009), p. 46

Mitt Romney photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“Lord Palmerston: Then you did not vote for me, friend Rowcliffe; you preferred voting for a Tory.
William Rowcliffe: I did not vote for you, my Lord, for if I had, I should have voted for a Tory.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

During the general election of July 1865 where the Chartist Rowcliffe voted for a Conservative and another Liberal in order to oust Palmerston from the two-member constituency; quoted in F. J. Snell, Palmerston's Borough (Tiverton, 1894), pp. 107-112.
1860s

“People get what they vote for.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

2010s, 2017, Interview with Bill Kristol (2017)

James Carville photo

“Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

Account of speech to a group, in Had enough?: A handbook for fighting back (2003), p. 2 http://books.google.com/books?id=gH4bMmu4CA4C

Related topics