John M. Barr
History 6393
Twentieth Century U.S.
Dr. Buzzanco
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the
American Consensus
The conservative columnist and political commentator George Will once
wrote that in the 1964 election Barry Goldwater may have “lost 44 states but won
the future.” Indeed, after the 1964 election, which Goldwater lost to President
Lyndon B. Johnson in one of the worst landslides in U.S. electoral history, it
appeared to virtually everyone that conservatism was dead as a political force in
America. Nevertheless, in 1980 America elected Ronald Reagan to the
presidency; an event that William F. Buckley, Jr. noted later was as close to
conservative nirvana as possible. Reagan’s ascendance to the presidency
occurred for many reasons, not the least of which was because of the
conservative movement built in the early 1960s during a failed attempt to elect
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater to the White House in 1964.
“But something remained after 1964,” Rick Perlstein writes in this welldocumented narrative history of the conservative revolution, Before the Storm:
Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, “a movement.
An army.” According to Perlstein, a journalist for The Nation, The Village Voice,
and other periodicals, even though most Americans “remember the sixties as the
decade of the left” it was, as Murray Kempton wrote in1961, a decade of
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“conservative revival” and conservatism was “the youth movement of the ‘60s.”1
The focus and contribution of Perlstein’s account is to tell the story of the making
of this conservative army, how it came into being, the forces that shaped it, the
major characters – known and unknown – who helped win Barry Goldwater the
Republican nomination for the presidency in 1964, and, although losing an
election, laying the groundwork for Reagan’s election in 1980. In the process of
this riveting tale, Perlstein demonstrates how America, on the cusp of the ‘60s,
was changing into a country where “the best measure of a politician’s electoral
success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people’s desires,
but how well he could tap their fears.”2
Thus Perlstein describes the major architects – or generals – of the foot
soldiers that wrested the Republican Party away from the moderate Eastern
Establishment and into the hands of conservatives. These included the founder
of National Review magazine and intellectual firebrand of the movement, William
F. Buckley, Jr. who once described himself to Mike Wallace as “a revolutionary
against the present liberal order” and who warned Americans against utopian
attempts to perfect America, which Buckley disparaged as “immanetizing the
eschaton.”; 3 Barry Goldwater, the Republican Senator from Arizona whose
idealistic and libertarian political philosophy forged in the western desert of
Arizona stole “conservatism from the sole possession of old men”4 and inspired a
generation of conservative activists; Ronald Reagan, the former actor and ex1
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American
Consensus, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001) , xiii.
2 Perlstein, Before the Storm, xii.
3 Ibid. , 74-75.
4 Perlstein, Before the Storm, 64-65.
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Democrat who by the 1950s was crisscrossing the country for General Electric
Theater to deliver in his “aw shucks” manner what Frank Sinatra and others in
Hollywood labeled as “the Speech,” thrilling and astonishing thousands with his
anti-Communist and small government rhetoric; and conservative foils like
Nelson Rockefeller, Lyndon Johnson, and a host of others.
One of the great virtues of Perlstein’s book is that he not only writes about
the major leaders of the conservative movement, but also resurrects from
obscurity some lesser-known but crucially important characters as well. Brent
Bozell, for example, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law and ghostwriter of
Goldwater’s enormously popular Conscience of a Conservative, Clarence “Pat”
Manion, a law professor from Notre Dame who sent letters to people across the
country as early as 1959 to establish a “Goldwater Committee of 100” to draft
Barry Goldwater for president, the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the
infantry of the conservative army, Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch
Society, with a membership in the tens of thousands, and F. Clifton White, the
man who more than any other studied the machinery of how candidates were
nominated for office by the Republican Party, and who through sheer
organizational effort wrested the Republican party away from the moderates and
delivered it to Goldwater in 1964 in San Francisco. Finally, the man
conservatives loved to hate, Walter Reuther, head of the United Auto Workers
(UAW) Union and, according to Perlstein, “a useful adversary; years later
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conservatives should have lifted a glass in his honor. There would have likely not
been much of a conservative movement without him as catalyst.”5
Thus the Republican Party was transformed into the vehicle – or tank – of
the conservative movement and this is the “vast right-wing conspiracy” to which
Hilary Rodham Clinton (who voted for Goldwater in 1964!) once referred; the
intersection of wealthy anti-government businessmen, freedom-loving
libertarians, whites from Boston to Mississippi disgusted by the Civil Rights
movement and Supreme Court decisions, and all united by hatred and fear – with
perhaps a touch of paranoia – for Communism.
None of this should have been too surprising to liberals, Perlstein argues,
for in a sense the conservative movement which they mocked and lamented
simultaneously was, in a sense, their own creation:
Since McCarthy’s day, liberals had been wondering why apparently
intelligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the
United States would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It
was concluded that these were people who feared for their status in
a rapidly changing, complex urban society, who pined for a simpler
past. . . The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer; people were
afraid of internal Communist takeover because the government had
been telling them to be afraid. . . You could no less avoid breathing in
a bit of paranoia in Cold War America, in fact, than you could soot in
Charles Dickens’s Manchester.6 (emphasis mine)
Hence the conservatives marched into San Francisco in 1964 and wept
with joy at the nomination of Barry Goldwater for the presidency. Their joy was
short-lived, however, as Goldwater turned out, unlike his opponent President
Lyndon B. Johnson, to be a remarkably bad and ineffective presidential
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6
Perlstein, Before the Storm, 31-32.
Ibid. , 116.
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candidate, spurning help from men like F. Clifton White, and to his credit,
Governor George C. Wallace from Alabama. The only bright spot in Goldwater’s
campaign occurred exactly one week before election day when Ronald Reagan
gave “The Speech” on television, which was subsequently later broadcast all
over the United States. According to journalists David Broder and Steve Hess, it
was “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan
electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” 7
Reagan’s address was on television constantly in the seven days prior to the
election and was so effective that Americans “called their crazy fascist
Goldwaterite friends on the phone,” and said, Perlstein writes, “Now I get it . . .
Conservatives were no less stricken; they had never heard as gripping and pithy
a statement of what they believed.”8 (emphasis in original) Perhaps to
underscore Goldwater’s ineffectiveness as a candidate, and in an anecdote that
illustrates the wonder and delight of this book, Perlstein notes that Goldwater,
much to Nancy Reagan’s chagrin, never once thanked Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s speech was to no avail in overcoming the deficiencies in
Goldwater’s candidacy and Goldwater went down to a resounding defeat in 1964.
Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater’s 39 and over 43
million votes to just over 27 million for Goldwater. Importantly, Perlstein notes the
conformity of elite opinion regarding the meaning of Goldwater’s defeat, quoting
from the New York Times’ Scotty Reston the prognostication that Goldwater had
“wrecked his party for a long time to come,” Walter Lippmann opining that
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8
Ibid. , 498-504.
Ibid. , 509.
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Johnson’s victory was definitive proof that American “voters are in the center,”
the Los Angeles Time’s Washington Bureau Chief predicting that if the
conservative takeover of the Republican Party continues, Republicans “will
remain a minority party indefinitely,” and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. the voice of
America’s liberal historians, writing that “the election results of 1964 seemed to
demonstrate Thomas Dewey’s prediction about what would happen if the parties
were realigned on an ideological basis: ‘The Democrats would win every election
and the Republicans would lose every election.”9 The Democrats, basking in the
afterglow of their electoral massacre of Republicans, gleefully agreed with such
assessments.
The Democrats and elites, as Perlstein so aptly notes, missed the
subterranean or tectonic shifts taking place underneath the surface of
Goldwater’s defeat. Goldwater, to cite one example, carried five Southern states
in 1964, with Mississippi giving him 87 percent of the vote. And, in those
Southern states he lost, Perlstein writes “Republicans were elected to statewide
office in unprecedented numbers.”10 Another noteworthy trend, according to
Perlstein, and ignored by pundits because the “evidence around the country
didn’t fit the comforting conclusion” was “Goldwater’s overwhelming success in
hamlets with large numbers of Evangelical Christians, like Jerry Falwell’s
Lynchburg, Virginia.”11
Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm is an essential work of narrative and
analytical history for understanding not only the early 1960s but our current
9
Ibid. , 512-16.
Ibid. , 514.
11 Ibid. , 515.
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politics as well. This is a dazzling and fascinating work of political and social
history that cannot be ignored by Americans with even the slightest interest in
mass political movements. He shortchanges somewhat the influence of William
F. Buckley and his magazine National Review on the conservative movement
and the story of how Buckley purged elements like Robert Welch and Ayn Rand,
which helped mainstream conservative thought in the United States. At the very
least Buckley’s actions prevented conservatism from becoming a fringe element
in American politics. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the Whitaker Chambers
versus Alger Hiss case and its influence on the anticommunism of the
conservative movement is needed. And, at times the details of political
organizing leading up to and including the San Francisco convention are difficult
to follow, but these are mere quibbles in a great work of American political
history.
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