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

by Rick Perlstein

Goldwater was not deterred. “I would rather have Hoffa stealing my money,” he declared, “than Reuther stealing my freedom.”

“Life was not meant to be easy. The American people are adult—eager to hear the bold, blunt truth, weary of being kept in a state of perpetual adolescence.”

New Deal journalism has degenerated into a jaded defense of the status quo.... Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle-of-the-Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant.”

Nixon wanted to become President to command America in the Cold War. He was obsessed with the details of foreign affairs; domestic policy, he said famously a decade later, just takes care of itself.

Schuchman was Jewish—an advantage, making it harder for opponents to smear the group as fascist.

“Today,” he would say, “there is an increasing number who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they would seek the answer to all the problems of human need through government.”

Americans in the millions who were not Birchers, who had not read Conscience of a Conservative, who had not heard of National Review; whose families did not own factories, who did not live in military-industrial-libertarian enclaves like Orange County—all read the Thirteen Points, liked what they saw, then tuned out the voices of the experts who pointed to their unimpeachable evidence, moralists who demanded that they care more, and highbrows who compared them to Nazis.

This last message was heard most loudly from the party’s conservative star. “It’s just what I’ve been saying,” Goldwater told Time. “We cannot win as a dime-store copy of the opposition’s platform.”

In the address, later dubbed the “Forgotten American” speech, Goldwater argued that in a political scene jammed with minority and pressure groups, the only population left unorganized were those Americans “who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving.” The GOP, he said, must become the party of these “silent Americans.”

A negative profile in Life by the novelist Gore Vidal, who called Goldwater a fascist, came off making Vidal look like the crank, the intended victim an altogether affable fellow.

Rockefeller’s July 14 statement placed the responsibility at Barry Goldwater’s feet. The Republican Party, it began, “is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed, and highly disciplined minority.” They were “wholly alien to the broad middle course that accommodates the mainstream of Republican principle.” They “have no program for the Republican party or the American people except distrust, disunity, and the ultimate destruction of the confidence of the people in themselves. They are purveyors of hate and distrust in a time when, as never before, the need of the world is for love and understanding.” The conservatives “have no concern with and offer no solution to the problems of chronic unemployment, of education and training, of housing, of racial injustice and strife.”

Then Johnson told his best friend, Georgia senator Richard Russell, “I’m not going to cavil and I’m not going to compromise. I’m going to pass it just as it is, Dick, and if you get in my way I’m going to run you down. I just want you to know that, because I care about you.”

Getting two-thirds of the senators meant getting four-fifths of the Republicans. “You’re either for civil rights or you’re not, you’re either for the party of Lincoln or not,” he would tell them; if that didn’t work, there other methods. “I hope that satisfies those two goddamned bishops that called me last night,” Karl Mundt exclaimed after voting the President’s way on one early test vote.

“The essence of freedom is the right to discriminate,” CRA’s Nolan Frizzelle explained.

The governors refueled at a private breakfast after their all-nighters. Nixon asked for the floor. He announced he had no prepared remarks and would entertain questions. Moments passed; it suddenly dawned on the men in the room that Nixon was waiting for them to ask him to run for President.

The race to calumniate Barry Goldwater was on. To the New York Times’s editorialists, Goldwater had reduced “a once great party to the status of an ugly, angry, frustrated faction.” Columnist C. L. Sulzberger said that if Goldwater were elected “there may not be a day after tomorrow.” Governor Edmund Brown of California said, “The stench of fascism is in the air.” Asked how he would run his local campaigns with Goldwater heading up the ticket, a Chicago Republican leader replied, “I’ll jump off that bridge when I come to it.” Senator William Fulbright stung his colleague on the Senate floor in a series of speeches calling Goldwaterism “the closest thing in American politics to an equivalent of Russian Stalinism.”

NATO countries hastened to assure Americans that they regarded Goldwater’s solicitude toward them with nothing but dismay. The Tory Daily Telegraph spied “dark eddies in American life,” and Austria’s Neues Österreich observed “shivers” sent “down the back of humanity.” Time interviewed a Munich banker who said, “If we give you four or five years, you’ll start putting on brown shirts.” Goldwater’s only foreign support came from South Africans, Spanish monarchists, and German neofascists—which only made sense, according to a Washington Star editorial perfectly encapsulating the mood: “The greatest danger may be that this reactionary takeover of the Republican machinery will induce a radical new alignment of the parties, splitting them once and for all into organizations of the right and the left.”

“I did not leave the Democratic Party. It left me!” Thurmond’s example was a powerful catalyst for those lesser mortals in the crowds wondering whether to make the switch for themselves—if not at the registration table, at least in the voting booth.

But the ad that showed up most frequently focused on two hands taking a Social Security card from a wallet and tearing it clean in two. “On at least seven occasions,” said the voice-over, “Senator Barry Goldwater said that he would change the present Social Security system. But even his running mate, William Miller, admits that Senator Goldwater’s voluntary plan would destroy the Social Security system. President Johnson is working on strengthening Social Security.” There was, of course, no such “voluntary plan”; the subject had barely crossed Goldwater’s lips since the primary in New Hampshire.

“The danger is that he might well see to it that this year’s election is our last free election.”

Rus Walton explained his modus operandi at a meeting the afternoon before Conversation at Gettysburg provided a lesson in how not to sell a presidential candidate. “We want to just make them mad, make their stomach turn,” he said, “take this latent anger and concern which now exists, build it up, and subtly turn and focus it”—focus it against the ruthless man in the White House from which all these evils had to be shown to flow.

In 1953 Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding homosexuals be fired not just from all federal jobs but from all companies with federal contractors—one-fifth of the U.S. workforce.

The man whom Johnson beat in his first congressional election went on statewide TV on behalf of “Texas Doctors for Goldwater” and compared his old opponent with “Hitler and his crew of very curious people,” stating that the Civil Rights Act gave the President “all the power Adolf Hitler ever had.”

A rumor spread that Goldwater’s 9999th Air Reserve Squadron was really a cabal working for military takeover of the government, Seven Days in May-style.