!$ Before the Storm Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

I really enjoyed Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, in spite of its structural flaws and shaky thesis. Unfortunately, Perlstein's first book - an exploration of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's disastrous yet epochal 1964 Presidential campaign - is not quite as good as his second.



Goldwater is certainly an interesting and important figure. His Presidential campaign was the extension of a budding conservativism, angry at the moderation preached by Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, with young Jeremiahs like William F. Buckley and M. Stanton Evans leading the charge to restore traditional values. As Perlstein shows, the new conservativism was not a gaggle of stuffy old fogeys opposing progress; it was as much a youth movement as the "New Left" and budding counterculture. Seeing liberalism as America's consensus ideology, the conservatives enjoyed framing themselves as rebels - hence Evans' book, Revolt on the Campus. And Barry Goldwater's campaign against Lyndon B. Johnson was the ultimate rebellion.



Goldwater's staunch anti-Communist, anti-big government, pro-free market and law and order platform was roundly rejected in 1964, due to a variety of factors: a Republican Party divided between conservatives and establishment moderates like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, Goldwater himself, whose heart never seemed quite in it, the extremism of his supporters, and the ruthlessness of LBJ. Goldwater's seemingly-radical stance frightened Americans who weren't ready for the division that would explode into violent culture war a few years later. Still, Goldwater's defeat sewed the seeds of the modern conservative movement, and Ronald Reagan would win in an comparable landslide sixteen years later, running on an almost identical platform.



As in Nixonland, Perlstein crams the narrative with digression and details, some illustrative and revealing, others notsomuch. These anecdotes serve a better purpose in Nixonland, where he was trying to paint a broad picture of a complex time period, and digressions from the main topic served a purpose. The portrait of early '60s America is surprisingly limited in comparison, focusing mostly on Goldwater and the GOP, and there's no sense of breadth or scope; as such, digressions like a five-page plot description of Doctor Strangelove and seem out of place. Some topics are brought up and dropped with little fanfare - in particular, Henry Cabot Lodge and Richard Nixon's abortive bids for the GOP nomination. There seems little consistency to what Perlstein is interested in, and at times the narrative suffers for its rambling imbalance of content.



Still, Perlstein's book is definitely worth a look. He paints a vivid picture of conservativism in the early '60s, finding its sea legs as a political force and not yet ready for the big time. His portrait of Goldwater himself is far more sympathetic and layered than his pure-evil portrayal of Richard Nixon - an honest man with earnest principles, but not entirely comfortable as the Republican Party's standard-bearer. If his analysis of Goldwater's appeal occasionally smacks of condescension, he ably shows Goldwater's political importance. 1964 was a disaster, but it was a harbinger of things to come - for the Republican Party, and America in general.
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