Author: Rick Perlstein

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2001

Book Reviewed By: Mike Schell, Chair of Democratic Rural Conference

Among Democratic partisans, there are a few who, to this day, wonder why in the heck, in their days of youth, they found the candidacy of Barry Goldwater so inspiring and attractive.

How could I in 1964 have been the youth coordinator at Fairport High for Barry Goldwater? I ask myself late at night. Hillary Clinton has told me that she too headed the Goldwater campaign in her high school. Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm gave me an answer in a very readable account of the Goldwater phenomena that is chock full of fascinating anecdotes and historical analysis.

This is less a book about Barry Goldwater, however, and more a story of the rise of the conservative movement during what many think of as a liberal decade. The conservative movement of the 1960's was a coalescing of diverse organizations and individuals, joined together by a common fear and hatred of government. John Birchers, southern racists and McCarthyites allied with otherwise moderate small business owners and even such mainstream organizations as the American Medical Association to support Goldwater. Bright young activists, with innate political skills, worked to organize at the grass roots, tapping into unhappiness with the government, especially the mandates to end segregation. Against all odds, they took over the Republican Party for a brief time. Perlstein weaves an interesting tale, as the uneasy coalition fractures when the less radical members struggle to distance themselves from the "crazies‚" and fractures again as the practical politicians seeking to win the 1964 election find themselves overruled time and again by idealistic purists.

Barry Goldwater personified the hopes of those diverse groups. Perlstein provides insights into Goldwater's personality and ideals. He was not the right wing radical that Democrats portrayed him as, or that ultra conservatives believed he was. He had supported raising the minimum wage and extending Social Security, and had voted for the civil rights bills of 1957 and 1960. Goldwater refused to demagogue on race, although many of his supporters did so. He is remembered for his courageous (or foolhardy) insistence on going into a region and lecturing on whatever position he had taken that would be most likely to infuriate his local supporters. His announcing in Tennessee that the TVA should be sold is merely the most famous. In Memphis, he spoke to cotton farmers on the evils of cotton subsidies, and he decided to attack the TFX military aircraft project while he was in Ft. Worth (home, of course, of the TFX). Goldwater and the idealists on his team felt that alienating audiences was evidence "he was doing something right - telling them things they needed, but didn't want to hear." To the practical politicians it was bad politics. Campaigning in Minnesota, instead of the speech his consultants gave him, he lectured the wheat farmers on government largesse being the cause of crime. Perlstein: "the denizens of Minnesota's crime-ridden wheat farms proved nonplussed." And his penchant for saber-rattling against the Soviet Union made him an easy target for opponents seeking to frighten voters into believing that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for nuclear war.

Goldwater did not have the politician's congenital need to be loved. At a huge conservative youth rally at Madison Square Garden, the packed auditorium screamed in adulation as Goldwater was introduced as "the next president of the United States." Five minutes of standing ovation, balloons dropping, banners waving, thousand cheering in unison: "we want Goldwater, we want Goldwater" - everything a red-blooded politician craves. When Goldwater took the microphone his opening words were a cranky "Well, if you'll shut up, you'll get him." It wasn't love he wanted, or adulation. Apparently, judging from Perlstein, it wasn't even votes. What he wanted was converts to a philosophy and a new vision for America.

My disappointment is that Before the Storm fails to acknowledge the extent to which the Goldwater effort succeeded in gaining those converts, and how those converts changed American history. While Perlstein provides an excellent account of the success of the right in taking over the Republican Party in 1964, the book ends with Goldwater's disastrous defeat. Not only was he crushed for the presidency, but he took with him Republicans in Congress, state offices and legislatures in such numbers that commentators suggested it was the final demise of the Republican party, or at least the end of conservatives' influence in the party. What remains unsaid it that it was only a matter of time before the conservative agenda drove the Republican machine. The legacy of 1964 was not the embarrassing defeat of the right it seemed, but the first step in its eventual success.

The reader looks for one more chapter or hints of what was to come after 1964. For example, a lawyer from Phoenix is mentioned as running a voter intimidation operation against minority voters in 1964, but no where is it noted that the lawyer, "Bill Rehnquist" did not end his career in politics after the embarrassment of 1964. In fact, Rehnquist became a key figure in the Republican Party - even playing a role choosing the first candidate of the 21st century. Perlstein chronicles the rise of Ronald Reagan as an effective public spokesman, but there is no analysis of the political and philosophical inheritance that would bring him to the presidency just 16 years later. It would have been interesting to follow the thread of those who turned defeat into victory.

The question remains, why did so many young people, including many who were under the voting age of 21, find Goldwater attractive, only to become Democratic activists later on? After reading Perlstein, it seems the answer lies in the natural instincts of youth itself: freedom, idealism and the need for autonomy. That was the attraction of the Goldwater campaign to many of us in 1964 as we leafed through the pages of "A Conscience of a Conservative," the book ghostwritten for Goldwater as a campaign polemic. (A confession: its length, 127 pages, large type, was what led me to select it for a book report.) Once in the hands of the student, Goldwater's message became a siren song. Struggling through the traditional adolescent's cutting of apron strings, demanding more freedom than adults seemed ready to give them, some teens were ready to hear the conservative call for less strictures on individuals. Keep the government (and Mom, Dad and the campus police) out of our lives.

For a generation that had grown up with air raid drills and fall out shelters, Goldwater's call for personal sacrifice in taking the initiative against the dreaded communists, despite risk of provoking war, "had an almost Ghandian appeal" to the youth of the day, according to Perlstein. It was the same appeal "held by valiant Southern blacks laying their bodies on the line for the freedom to eat where they wished. Freedom was indivisible. It was worth dying for." In short, Perlstein makes the case that the appeal of the Goldwater campaign and conservative principles to young people in 1964 was rooted in the idealism of youth and the natural youthful antipathy toward the establishment.

For some of us, the dalliance with Goldwater was but a "youthful indiscretion." For other talented and dedicated young politicos of our generation, however, it was a lifetime commitment to a cause that endured and prospered. Their story, culminating in the Reagen administration and the Gingrich revolution, is where I expected this book to go. Perhaps, like the creators of "Star Wars," Perlstein has intentionally set us up for a sequel. If the sequel is as absorbing as this book, it will be a valuable addition to the scholarly work on the period, and another delight to read.

*******

Mike Schell is chair of Democratic Rural Conference and former executive chair of the state Democratic Party.

07/24/2002