in the conservative movement. In doing this, Rusher sometimes disagreed with Buckley and senior editor James Burnham. In his philosophy of conservative politics and his belief in the urgent need for an active and unified movement to pursue conservative politics, he was especially close to another senior editor at the magazine, Frank Meyer. Rusher was an early mentor of Young Americans for Freedom, founded in Connecticut with his assistance in 1960. He helped to found the Conservative Party of New York State in 1961, and the American Conservative Union in 1964. He was a mentor to young conservative activists from these early years into the 1990s. In 1961, Rusher worked with Clif White and Congressman John Ashbrook to form the nucleus of what became U.S. Senator Barry M. Goldwater's campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1964, known as the Draft Goldwater Committee. Goldwater's victory in the bitterly fought nomination contest over New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and the previously dominant moderate or liberal establishment in the Republican Party was the first stage in the rise to national power of the conservative movement. In December 1961, Rusher was a founding member of the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters, a lobbying group which sought U.S. recognition of Katanga. In 1966, Rusher together with Max Yergan became co-chairmen of the American-African Affairs Association (AAAA), which lobbied the United States to recognize Rhodesia. A major theme of the publications of the American-African Affairs Association was the black opponents of Rhodesia were controlled by either the Soviet Union or China, and to allow majority rule in Rhodesia would thus allow Communism to be established there. In a letter to the editor of The Nation in 1967, Rusher admitted that an overlap in topics and themes expressed by the AAAA and the Rhodesian Information Office was due to the fact that AAAA shared the same offices at 79 Madison Avenue in New York as the public relations firm of Marvin Liebman Associates, which had been hired by the Information Office to improve Rhodesia's image in America. As a part of his efforts to assist Rhodesia, Rusher introduced Kenneth Towsey, the head of the New York office of the Rhodesian Information Office, to various media personalities where Towsey made his case that Rhodesia, which was often pillared in the United States for its white supremacist policies, was just being misunderstood