More Revolutionary Than You Thought?

In his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Rick Perlstein offers an intriguing thesis: While Goldwater may have been the biggest popular-vote loser in American presidential-race history, the movement which garnered him the 1964 Republican nomination laid the groundwork for the conservative revolution that led to the election of Ronald Reagan 16 years later, signaling the retreat of the modern welfare state as we know it.

Perlstein is a talented political writer—one whose work has appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect, Slate and The Village Voice, among others—and his seductively colorful writing style is in full form here. The book begins with tantalizing, epic promise. From the wreckage of Goldwater’s election disaster, Perlstein tells how 10 new conservative Republican governors were elected a mere two years later, eventually leading to Reagan’s 1980 triumph and Bill Clinton’s adoption of many of Reagan’s political positions in 1995—Perlstein argues that Clinton actually took many of his positions from Goldwater’s example. While his assertion that Clinton and Goldwater share many of the same stances is doubtful, Perlstein’s essential point is correct. Post-Reagan, only a New Democrat like Clinton could have retaken the White House from the GOP. The entire underpinning of American politics had changed by the 1990s. But while Perlstein astutely tells the story of Goldwater’s rise to national prominence, he fails to deliver the powerful ending his introduction describes, only hinting at the ramifications of the events of November 1964.

Perlstein’s greatest strength is his ability to craft a good narrative—even if, at 516 pages, Before the Storm is a whopper. In the book’s opening chapters Perlstein nicely depicts the Arizona cowboy milieu from which Goldwater emerged, even as he reinforces the emphasis the stately senator placed on duty throughout his life. It’s also a narrative that expertly explores the political landscape of the times. Despite his own leftist views, Perlstein carefully manages to leave his personal political biases out of the story, giving the reader an enjoyable rundown of Kennedy’s “Irish Mafia,” old-style Southern Democrats, Eisenhower’s essential acceptance of FDR’s New Deal and the growth of a young conservatives’ movement alongside the emergence of Students for a Democratic Society and sit-in activists. The book also gives an excellent analysis of the political geography of the time (who the most important operatives were, the scattered patchwork of support it took to win a national campaign and how everything was viewed through a lens of Communist paranoia) while harkening back to an era when the two parties’ conventions actually mattered, fistfights and all.

Before the Storm brings back to life a more enchanting era of American politics, one in which candidates largely said what they believed without micromanagement, “spin” was not an art form, presidential hopefuls could jump into a race a short few months before their party’s nominating convention and grassroots organizing—not TV commercials or sheer spending power—ruled the day. In short, it was a political world that was much less cynical, even if politicians on both sides of the aisle flamed Communist-infiltration rhetoric to their own advantage.

Perlstein’s attention to detail is part of that resurrection. Amusing anecdotes appear often throughout the book, helping along a text which, while well-written, could have been significantly shorter and just as effective. If a politician was militant and conservative in the postwar era, the reader quickly learns, then he was automatically labeled another “Hitler.” While driving to work, Charlton Heston suddenly converts to Goldwaterism. Writes Perlstein, “Looking up at an ‘In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right’ billboard at a Sacramento intersection, road-to-Damascus-style, on the way to a movie shoot, he thought to himself, ‘Son of a bitch, he is right.’” After being called “a political hypocrite and a moral coward” by one of his arch rivals in 1958, Goldwater shoots back, “schoolyard-style,” that his opponent should “look into the mirror and see who is the coward.” And as adoring crowds chant, “We Want Barry! We Want Barry!,” Goldwater, impatiently commanding the podium, growls his trademark line: “If you’ll shut up, you’ll get him.”

But the Goldwater anecdotes, while entertaining, mask a major problem in the book. Perlstein describes a fantastic universe of characters and personalities, including a bipolar LBJ and a young, liberal David Horowitz, but too often he goes off on long tangents, leaving Goldwater to simply make occasional appearances from his surreal airplane. After Goldwater’s rise to fame, we see very little of his inner thoughts, which is odd, considering that he is the book’s main character. Instead, we are treated to exquisite explorations of LBJ’s anxieties, Nixon’s cunning political ploys and the sadness of Goldwater’s loyal organizer, Clif White, when he returns from vacation to find his power undercut by Goldwater’s self-appointed “Arizona Mafia.” In a book that is supposed to be about Goldwater, figures like Johnson, Nixon and White take up far too much space.

And though the Goldwater campaign’s self-destruction in the final months of the campaign is well-documented—a series of mishaps which included Goldwater’s statement at the convention, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” and his remark that the Vietnamese Communists should be exposed by “defoliating that country’s forests with low-yield atomic weapons in a way that would not endanger life”—Before the Storm ultimately fails to define exactly how Goldwater’s 1964 defeat led to the monumental change in the political climate in years to come. Instead, the book ends with the media’s contemporaneous judgment on the Goldwater debacle, as the two leading political analysts of the time predict that if the Republicans again nominated a conservative, their candidate would lose so badly that it would put an end to a competitive two-party system. Perlstein concludes, “At that there seemed nothing more to say. It was time to close the book.” Goldwater’s post-1964 life, and how the Republican Party was able to make such a quick and remarkable recovery, are barely touched upon. Despite Perlstein’s claim that his is only a book about how the conservative revolution began, Before the Storm’s sudden ending leaves much to be desired.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

Hill and Wang

516 pp., $30