dismayed that people in the management portion of the corporate world seemed more interested in personal advancement than in doing good work. At Champion his bosses encouraged him to get involved in conservative politics for the company's benefit. In doing so he met Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and many other prominent Republicans, thus beginning the GOP epoch of his life. In his book Dear America, Hess wrote that he became an atheist because his temporary job as a coroner's assistant when he was 15 left him convinced that people were simply flesh-and-blood beings with no afterlife. Consequently, he stopped attending church (he had been a devout Roman Catholic). Years later, while on leave from Champion and working for the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), he resumed attending church because virtually all of his AEI colleagues did so. His return merely reinforced his atheism; on one Sunday morning, while enduring a service as his young son sat on his lap, Hess became disgusted with himself for exposing his child to an institution he himself had rejected. Political activities Hess was the primary author of the Republican Party's 1960 and 1964 platforms. In the lead-up to the 1964 presidential election, Hess worked closely with Barry Goldwater. He came to view Goldwater as a man of sterling character, a conservative holding a number of significant libertarian convictions. Hess worked as a speechwriter, and explored ideology and politics. He was widely considered to be the author of the renowned Goldwater line, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue," but revealed that he had encountered it in a letter from Lincoln historian Harry Jaffa and later learned it was a paraphrase of a passage from Cicero. He later called this his "Cold Warrior" phase. Following the 1964 presidential campaign in which Lyndon Johnson trounced Goldwater, Hess became disillusioned with traditional politics and became more radical. Hess and others on the losing team had found themselves outsiders within the national Republican party because of their support of the controversial Goldwater. Hess felt that he had been purged by the Republicans and he departed from involvement with grand-scale politics altogether. In 1965 Hess took up motorcycle riding. His need to occasionally repair his motorcycles led to his interest in welding (which he learned at Bell Vocational School). Welding skills gave him something he could trade upon. Initially,