Before the Storm Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Praise

  PREFACE

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1 - THE MANIONITES

  Chapter 2 - MERCHANT PRINCE

  Chapter 3 - WORKING TOGETHER FOR THE WORLD

  Chapter 4 - CONSCIENCE

  Chapter 5 - THE MEETING OF THE BLUE AND WHITE NILE

  PART TWO

  Chapter 6 - QUICKENING

  Chapter 7 - STORIES OF ORANGE COUNTY

  Chapter 8 - APOCALYPTICS

  Chapter 9 - OFF YEAR

  Chapter 10 - SUITE 3505

  Chapter 11 - MOBS

  PART THREE

  Chapter 12 - NEW MOOD IN POLITICS

  Chapter 13 - GRANITE STATE

  Chapter 14 - PRESIDENT OF ALL THE PEOPLE

  Chapter 15 - UNITED AND AT PEACE WITH ITSELF ...

  Chapter 16 - GOLDEN STATE

  Chapter 17 - DUTY

  Chapter 18 - CONVENTIONS

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 19 - DON’T MENTION THE GREAT PUMPKIN

  Chapter 20 - CAMPAIGN TRAILS

  Chapter 21 - CITIZENS

  Chapter 22 - FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright Page

  Praise for BEFORE THE STORM

  “Writing with the authority of an academic historian and the dash of a journalist, Mr. Perlstein manages to break free of the partisan idées reçues and doctrinal laziness that typify so much writing on recent history. There is something independent, un-bought-out and, in the best sense, radical about this book.”

  —Christopher Caldwell, The New York Observer

  “Occasionally a book comes along which causes historians to rethink an entire era. Rick Perlstein’s remarkable Before the Storm is such an achievement: elegantly written, copiously researched, brimming with fresh anecdotes. Perlstein illuminates how conservatism erupted into a mass political movement while the academic scholars and media pundits were embracing Great Society Liberalism and Counterculture Despair. A truly landmark study.”

  —Douglas Brinkley, author of The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s

  Journey Beyond the White House

  “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 ... Let us hope that Perlstein is already at work on another book about it all.”

  —William A. Rusher, National Review

  “Offer[s] much background on the remarkable fact of contemporary politics: most of our major political institutions ... are today owned by the right, although, issue by issue, the causes of the right are unpopular ... Perlstein has a nose for pungent detail. It is hard to imagine that he has missed any interesting or delicious fact about Goldwater or his circle of devotees.”

  —Todd Gitlin, Boston Review

  “Perlstein is such a great storyteller—one of the most enjoyable historians I’ve ever read.”

  —Robert Sherrill, The Nation

  “One of the finest studies of the American right to appear since the days of Hofstadter. Read it and understand where the mad public faiths of our own day came from.”

  —Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler and author of One Market Under God

  “Perlstein retells this story with energy and skill ... His vibrant, detailed narrative moves swiftly and brings a large cast to life.”

  —Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic

  “Comprehensive and compelling ... The heart of Perlstein’s lengthy book is his colorful account of the intellectual giants, the canny political operatives, and the far-out fellow travelers in the conservative cause.”

  —Richard S. Dunham, Business Week

  “Before the Storm is told dazzlingly. Perlstein re-creates the social and cultural milieu that gave rise to the conservative movement with earned authority and easy patience ... Insightful, gracefully written, well-paced and sympathetic to its central characters’ motivations.”

  —Michael Tomasky, Newsday

  “Perlstein’s narrative ... is never less than compelling, brilliantly researched and reported.”

  —Sara Scribner and David Daley, The Hartford Courant

  “Although conservative Republicans suffered a humilating defeat in 1964, the principles they had embraced and the organization they had built endured, soon to bring them local, state and then national victories. Perlstein tells this story with energy and insight, and in lively prose.”

  —Gary Gerstle, Dissent

  “Finally, a gifted writer has told the full story of the difficult birth and exuberant adolescence of the conservative movement that went on to transform American politics. Rick Perlstein’s indispensable history is stuffed with wit, learning, and drama. After reading it, you will never think of the 1960s in the same way again.”

  —Michael Kazin, co-author of

  America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s

  Rick Perlstein

  BEFORE THE STORM: BARRY GOLDWATER AND THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS

  RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. His essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among other publications. He has received a National Endowment of the Humanities grant for independent scholars, and he is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future. He lives with his wife in Chicago.

  It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.—Jonathan Swift

  Politics ain’t bean bag.—Mr. Dooley

  PREFACE

  At their 1964 convention in San Francisco, the Republican Party emerged from a corrosive faction fight between its left and right wings to do something that was supposed to be impossible: they nominated a conservative. Barry Goldwater went down to devastating defeat in November at the hands of Lyndon Johnson, and there, for most observers, the matter stood: the American right had been rendered a political footnote—perhaps for good.

  The wise men weighed in. Reston of the Times: “He has wrecked his party for a long time to come and is not even likely to control the wreckage.” Rovere of The New Yorker: “The election has finished the Goldwater school of political reaction.” “By every test we have,” declared James MacGregor Burns, one of the nation’s most esteemed scholars of the presidency, “this is as surely a liberal epoch as the late 19th Century was a conservative one.”

  Some, recalling the words of Thomas Dewey, worried for the future of the two-party system itself: if the parties realigned along ideological axes, he had said, “the Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.” Others imagined, in the words of a Partisan Review writer, “a recrudescence on American soil of precisely those super-nationalistic and right-wing trends that were finally defeated in Europe at the cost of a great war, untold misery, and many millions dead.”

  It was one of the most dramatic failures of collective discernment in the history of American journalism. After the off-year elections a mere two years later, conservatives so dominated Congress that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t even get up a majority to appropriate money for rodent control in the slums. The House Republican Caucus elected as chair of its Policy Committee John Rhodes, one of Barry Goldwater’s Arizona protégés. In 1964 there were sixteen Republican governors, all but two of them moderates; in 1966 ten new conservative Republican governors were voted in. In 1980 Americans elected one of them, Ronald Reagan, as their President. And in 1995 Bill Clinton paid Rea
gan tribute by adopting many of his political positions. Which had also been Barry Goldwater’s positions. Here is one time, at least, in which history was written by the losers.

  This is a book about how that story began.

  It is hard, now, to grasp just how profoundly the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted between 1964 and today. Think of a senator winning the Democratic nomination in the year 2000 whose positions included halving the military budget, socializing the medical system, reregulating the communications and electrical industries, establishing a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, and equalizing funding for all schools regardless of property valuations—and who promised to fire Alan Greenspan, counseled withdrawal from the World Trade Organization, and, for good measure, spoke warmly of adolescent sexual experimentation. He would lose in a landslide. He would be relegated to the ash heap of history. But if the precedent of 1964 were repeated, two years later the country would begin electing dozens of men and women just like him. And not many decades later, Republicans would have to proclaim softer versions of these positions just to get taken seriously for their party’s nomination. The analogy wouldn’t be exaggerating what has happened since 1964 too much. It might even be underplaying it. When commentators want to remark on today’s sweeping embrace of market thinking, the retreat of the regulatory state, and America’s military role as the “indispensable nation,” a shorthand rolls off their tongue: “There Is No Alternative”—TINA. But such things have been said before.

  Go back to 1952. When the first Republican President in twenty years was elected, liberals feared Dwight D. Eisenhower would try to roll back the Democratic achievements of the New Deal—minimum wage and agricultural price supports; the Tennessee Valley Authority, that massive complex of government-built dams that brought electricity to entire swatches of the Southeast that had never seen it before; Social Security; and many, many more. Instead, the Republican President further institutionalized and expanded such programs. He created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, championed low-income housing, chartered the federal interstate system, proclaimed Social Security as much an American institution as the free enterprise system—and extended its reach more than Roosevelt or Truman ever had. Black Americans’ legal status as second-class citizens was beginning to be dismantled; it seemed only logical to assume that the racial attitudes that undergirded segregation would also wither once the general prosperity, and increased help from Washington, lifted white Southerners from their status as economic pariahs. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and the President were tripping over each other to declare their comity over matters of national defense. And under their shared watch another broad consensus formed: that the Soviet Union might be evil, but nothing “so dangerous to the United States that we can afford to burn up the world over it,” as Walter Lippmann put it. America’s history of ideological disputation seemed to be over. The nation had settled into a governing equilibrium. And commentators began speaking of the American “consensus.” There was no alternative. New complexities brought new needs; government had to change—grow—to respond to them. “To meet the needs of the people,” as The Atlantic Monthly neatly summarized the consensus’s tenets, “the federal government must contribute to a solution of the manifold problems of modern urban life—housing, education, welfare, mass transportation, health, and civil rights—and it must promote policies that stimulate a healthy economy.”

  This was not ideology. This was reality. One did not argue with people who denied reality. Which was why the pundit Stewart Alsop wrote that conservatism was “not really a coherent, rational alternative at all—it is hardly more than an angry cry of protest against things as they are”; and why the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter joked that he welcomed the Goldwater-for-President movement when it sprang up because it was providing conservatives “a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed.”

  Men like this did not detect the ground shifting beneath their feet. They didn’t notice that year by year, crisis by crisis, America was slowly becoming more divided than it was united.

  In 1961 John F. Kennedy scaled back an exile invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. Castro stood his ground. The next year the Soviets tried to make Cuba a base for nuclear missiles trained on North America. Millions of Americans were thus converted to the right-wing doctrine that any weakness in the face of the Soviets was an accommodation with evil, bringing the Communists one step closer to their goal of world domination. On the other hand, millions were converted to the left-wing position that the Soviets must be met halfway lest the world court Armageddon.

  Blacks staged sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, rode through Dixie on buses alongside whites in defiance of local laws and in accordance with the rulings of the United States Supreme Court, marched through the streets of Southern cities in ever-escalating confrontation with the customs and codes of segregation. Millions thrilled to the moral transcendence of these heroic warriors for freedom. Millions of others decided that rabble-rousers—perhaps Communist dupes—were spitting on law and order, overturning tradition, and might not stop until they had forced their way into their own Northern white neighborhoods.

  Experts stepped forward to manage and coordinate people’s problems; more and more people decided they wanted to be left alone. Union power was turning a proletariat into a middle class—and union members began wondering how much of their dues went to subsidize civil rights groups that were eager to break up their neighborhood school districts. Millions stirred to Lyndon Johnson’s visions of governmental expertise distributing the bounty of an abundant society to those who had been left behind. But millions also looked at the bottom line on their tax returns and wondered why these people couldn’t help themselves. They wondered why, when they tried to impress on government what they considered their interests, they were met with indifference, or incompetence, or were swallowed inside a bureaucratic maze—or were called extremists and reactionaries, even borderline mental cases. City councils proudly passed laws outlawing the refusal to sell property to people on the basis of their race. And in places as diverse as Seattle, Berkeley, Phoenix, Detroit, and Akron, citizens used any direct democratic means at their disposal to strike them from the books. They were slowly disproving the Establishment cliché that an increasingly complex, urban society would necessitate politicians committed to finding solutions for the manifold problems of modern urban life. The cliché was based on a demographic error anyway, which few noticed: perhaps half the people the U.S. Census Bureau classed as “urban” lived in the suburbs. And suburbanites would demand a different kind of politician.

  If the Restons and the Lippmanns and the James MacGregor Burnses had tugged at such loose threads, they would have seen another entire, unwelcome story revealed beneath the upholstery. America was becoming a different place from the one they thought they knew. 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.

  This is a book, also, about how that story began.

  Scratch a conservative today—a think-tank bookworm at Washington’s Heritage Foundation or Milwaukee’s Bradley Foundation (the people whose studies and position papers blazed the trails for ending welfare as we know it, for the school voucher movement, for the discussion over privatizing Social Security) ; a door-knocking church lady pressing pamphlets into her neighbors’ palms about partial-birth abortion; the owner of a small or large business sitting across the table from a lobbyist plotting strategy on how to decimate corporate tax rates; an organizer of a training center for aspiring conservative activists or journalists; Republican precinct workers, fund-raisers, county chairs, state chairs, presidential candidates, congressmen, senators, even a Supreme Court justice—and the story comes out. How it all began for them: in the Goldwater campaign.

  It was something more than just finding ideological sou
l mates. It was learning how to act: how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate—how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering. How to feel bigger than yourself. It was something beyond the week, the year, the campaign, even the decade; it was a cause. You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle, suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more. Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?—that was how William F. Buckley entitled an anthology of conservative writings in 1970. Later that year, his brother won a Senate seat from New York with the backing of the state’s Conservative Party. The dream was walking. Maybe it wasn’t even just an army. Maybe it was a moral majority.

  America would remember the sixties as a decade of the left. It must be remembered instead as a decade when the polarization began. “We must assume that the conservative revival is the youth movement of the ’60s,” Murray Kempton wrote in 1961, in words that would sound laughable five years later. Forty years later, these are words that are, at the very least, arguable.