Karl Hess first glimpsed political power as a speechwriter for the US senator Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 presidential campaign. Hess found the experience deeply disenchanting, transforming this former ‘Cold Warrior’ who’d helped launch the conservative magazine National Review into an idiosyncratic political philosopher who viewed any powerful institution with intense scepticism. In Karl Hess: Toward Liberty, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1981, the US filmmakers Roland Hallé and Peter Ladue trace this transformation. Hess describes how, after his time in elite circles, he reinvented himself as a libertarian thinker who, having taken up welding and built his own home, came to embody his values of self-reliance and localism. While his views don’t easily map on to contemporary US partisan politics, they comment on our current world – including debates over AI, energy and education – in often prescient and penetrating ways.
A Republican speechwriter-turned-welder’s radical gospel of localism
Director: Roland Hallé, Peter Ladue
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