Voice in the Wilderness
Perlstein knows the significance of the Goldwater story.

By William A. Rusher, distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute & former publisher of National Review
April 21-22, 2001

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein (Hill and Wang, 671 pp., $30)

s Alan Brinkley observed in the American Historical

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Review in April 1994, "American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship." This should be no cause for surprise; most contemporary historians are liberals, and there was no obvious reason why they should devote themselves to the objective study of a phenomenon they found it positively painful to contemplate — especially since the tale, as it unfolded across the decades, turned out to be a success story. So the modern American conservative movement has been left, for many years, to the tender mercies of writers who had something very different from objective historical scholarship on their minds.

Sheer silence was the treatment of choice in the 1950s, though a few liberal commentators weighed in with snide observations. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose judgment in these matters is dependably poor (we shall hear from him again, later in this review), assured readers of the New York Times Magazine in mid-decade that the movement had no significance, being merely "the ethical afterglow of feudalism." John Fischer, the editor of Harper's, was kinder, writing in its March 1956 issue that National Review, the movement's leading (indeed, only) journal of opinion, might "serve a useful purpose in feeding the emotional hungers of a small congregation of the faithful, and it will have a certain interest for students of political splinter movements."

By the early 1960s, the growth of the conservative movement, and its consequent higher visibility, prompted certain other liberals to tackle the subject. Now the analysis tended to be clinical: Conservatism did not need to be understood so much as diagnosed. Richard Hofstadter, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, turned to psychology for an explanation, suggesting that a sense of "persecution" characterized conservatives.

No doubt Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 reconfirmed serious liberal historians in their belief that there was nothing here worth studying. In any case, another 16 years rolled by without any objective history worthy of the name. (An important exception, written by one of the few conservative historical scholars in the country, was George H. Nash's magisterial study, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published by Basic Books in 1976.)

But one might suppose that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ratified the ascendancy of the conservative movement in American politics, would surely inspire, at last, serious attention to the movement's history. Alas, no; another two decades passed in virtual silence, prompting Professor Brinkley's comment, quoted above.

It is only now, with the appearance of a whole new generation of political historians who were born too late to participate in the ideological wars of the 1950s and subsequent decades, that we are being vouchsafed the objective attention the conservative movement has deserved for more than forty years. And it is good news that one of the earliest of these studies, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein, is comprehensively researched, well written, and basically fair.

Although focused on Goldwater, this is no mere biography; it is a comprehensive account of the growth of the conservative movement from its origins to Goldwater's crushing defeat in November 1964. Perlstein makes no bones about being personally liberal, but he is honest enough to admit that the founders of the conservative movement "set the spark that lit the fire that consumed an entire ideological universe."

Perlstein prefers politicians to intellectuals, and this bias misleads him into spending an unnecessary amount of time on various conservative political efforts in the 1950s that got nowhere — notably the brave but doomed efforts of Dean Clarence ("Pat") Manion of Notre Dame Law School — while giving relatively short shrift to the central conservative event of the decade: the founding of National Review by Bill Buckley in 1955. Conservatism was preeminently a movement of ideas, and ideas took precedence over political action in its first decade. In the beginning was the Word. But once the political actors begin arriving on the scene in the late 1950s and early '60s, there is little that Perlstein misses.

The attempt to nominate Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican convention was premature and predictably failed. But his Conscience of a Conservative (actually written by L. Brent Bozell Jr.), which had to be published by a corporation set up for the purpose if it were to see daylight at all, sold 3.5 million copies in hardcover and paperback, and by 1961 the woods were full of young political activists ready to do battle in his name. Young Americans for Freedom, the youth arm of the conservative movement, was founded in September 1960. The Conservative party of New York was launched by a couple of Young Turks to challenge Nelson Rockefeller in the 1962 gubernatorial election. And in October 1961, 22 men who had honed their skills in the Young Republican politics of the 1950s reunited quietly in a Chicago motel to found the nameless committee that, incredibly, would capture the Republican party in 1964 and hand its presidential nomination to Barry Goldwater.

Among the heroes of Perlstein's book is F. Clifton White, the gangly professional politician from upstate New York who summoned those old YR cronies to Chicago and then spent two thankless years traveling around the United States, whipping them into the formidable organization that wrested the GOP from the grip of its "moderate" eastern managers — as it turned out, forever.

Not that Goldwater appreciated the favor. Not altogether without reason, he felt that he was being used by these hard-bitten young conservative politicos for purposes more their own than his. He didn't particularly want the presidency; he didn't think he could win it (especially after Kennedy's assassination); and he would have to give up his beloved Senate seat to make the race. So when at last he felt forced by circumstances to run, knowing that he would lose, he grimly sidelined White and what had by now become the Draft Goldwater Committee, and put his own Arizona cronies (quickly dubbed "the Arizona Mafia") in command of his campaign. White, who rightly felt he had earned the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, saw it go instead to an Arizonan, while he was awarded the meaningless title of chairman of Citizens for Goldwater-Miller. (Years later, Goldwater magnanimously admitted his error: "White deserved the post," he wrote in his autobiography, "because his Draft Goldwater Committee had given us the political muscle to assure the nomination…. Not selecting White was a mistake.")

Perlstein's coverage of the years from 1960 to 1964 is admirably complete. All the intrigues and subplots are here: the famous Compact of Fifth Avenue, in which Nixon knuckled under to Nelson Rockefeller's platform ideas in 1960 in order to ensure his support (and succeeded only in enraging Goldwater); the byzantine theories and wide-eyed zealotry of the John Birch Society, which alienated the rest of the conservative movement with its mad conviction that practically anything bad that happened in America was the work of secret Communists; Rockefeller's all-out drive for the 1964 nomination, fatally undermined when his new wife gave birth to their first child days before the California primary, reminding voters that he had publicly ditched her predecessor; the brief heyday of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as a presidential possibility; Lyndon Johnson's diabolically clever campaign; Goldwater's agonized decision to vote against the Civil Rights Act (he was a longtime supporter of the NAACP in Phoenix, but was convinced that the CRA was unconstitutional); the klutzy campaign waged on his behalf by the Arizona Mafia; Johnson's landslide victory in November 1964.

Amidst such riches, it seems almost ungenerous to single out one aspect for criticism, but fidelity to the historical record requires it. In a chapter entitled "Mobs," Perlstein devotes the first 13 pages to a vivid description of the racial unrest that was flaring in many states and communities in the early 1960s. The only trouble is that Goldwater's name is almost nowhere to be found. Yet the heavy emphasis on racial strife, in a book about Goldwater, leaves the almost inescapable impression that the former had a lot to do with the latter's nomination.

That is also the implication of the expression "the Southern strategy," which to this day is frequently, and misleadingly, used to describe the plan whereby White, and the Goldwater forces generally, captured the Republican party. It suggests that the whole idea was simply to appeal to previously Democratic white Southerners to support a Republican who was dependably anti-black.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Goldwater's opposition to segregation was longstanding and well known. No doubt he won the votes of many former (or current) Democrats who opposed Lyndon Johnson's civil-rights initiatives — indeed, on Election Day the only states Goldwater carried, save for his own Arizona, were all in the Deep South. But the conservative movement from which he sprang, and to which his nomination gave such momentum, was based on a different political strategy altogether. It was not spelled out in print until 1969, when Kevin Phillips wrote his brilliant study, The Emerging Republican Majority, but its basics had been sensed, and acted on, by those 22 young politicos in that Chicago motel in October 1961. The truly new voters recruited to the conservative cause between 1955 and 1964 were the young, upwardly mobile couples, often from the North, that were swelling the suburbs of the new, or newly reborn, cities of the South and West: Atlanta, Tulsa, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, and so on. Perlstein recognizes this, devoting a whole chapter to "Stories of Orange County," the Los Angeles suburb with perhaps the most vigorous local conservative movement in the country (and precious few race problems). But his gratuitous emphasis on the racial strife of the early 1960s distorts the picture.

Anyone who has read Perlstein's wonderfully colorful account of the Goldwater nomination and his subsequent defeat in November 1964 will be sorry that the book stops there. There is obviously so much more to be told — about the conservative movement that rose, phoenix — like, from that defeat; about the astonishing man, Ronald Reagan, who led it to national victory; and even about Barry Goldwater himself, who returned to the Senate and became for years a favorite of the liberals who had once feared and despised him.

Let us hope that Perlstein is already at work on another book about it all. He certainly knows the significance of the story. "Here," he says, "is one time, at least, in which history was written by the losers."

On his last page, he cruelly quotes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on the significance of 1964. It demonstrated, the good professor opined, "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."

Whereupon Perlstein, with heavy irony, ends his story: "At that there seemed nothing more to say. It was time to close the book."