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

by Rick Perlstein

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 ...

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.

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.

Like their internationalist cousins, Taftites held that the Communist conspiracy was America’s eternal enemy. But they also believed that America’s antecedent eternal enemy—what George Washington warned of in his farewell address as “entangling alliances”—was worse. The solution to this contradiction was the belief that policies such as signing mutual security pacts in the NATO mold and pledging foreign aid to vulnerable nations sapped America’s ability to fight the menace at home, where the real threat was, from traitors like Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, and the agents in the federal government who would bring America to her knees through social spending that would cripple the economy through inflation—Russia’s most devious offensive of all.

The Supreme Court had delivered its “Brown II” decision, mandating that school integration go forward with “all deliberate speed,” and a new political culture of “massive resistance” blossomed in Dixie almost overnight. Nearly every Southern congressman signed a manifesto pledging to defy the Court by “all lawful means.”

Reading profiles of Goldwater written in the eight or so years of his uninterrupted honeymoon with the press as a young senator is a bit like driving that stretch of desert interstate: the illusion of autonomy came courtesy of dollars and leadership from Washington; the sweeping view that seems to encompass the horizon hides everything beyond a narrow ribbon of reality.

The same year that Kitchel argued in front of the Supreme Court, the right-wing Dallas Morning News ran an editorial headlined “MAGNA CARTA.” It proposed an amendment to the Constitution to make forcing a worker to join a union illegal—protecting the “right to work.” It was a masterstroke. Now, pressing for right-to-work laws, companies could wield the most potent symbol in the American civil religion : liberty. Unions were left in the rhetorical dust. Labor lawyer Arthur J. Goldberg was left to defend the union shop by claiming that unions weren’t exactly voluntary organizations in the first place, but more like armies: they required conscription to exist. That didn’t sound very American. The right achieved a major victory when the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 gave states license to pass their own right-to-work laws. (Arizona was the first to do so.) Every year afterward liberals fought to repeal the union shop exemption, and conservatives fought to preserve it—and to pass more state right-to-work laws.

Companies who had fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to fire workers whenever and however they liked, who had workers’ blood on their hands, could now effectively style themselves as the worker’s best friend.

The grandest of all the actions struck GM’s giant works in Flint, Michigan. It was a watershed in labor history. At the height of the uprising, in early 1937, the new Michigan governor, Frank Murphy, moved in the militia, and strikers prepared for the inevitable blows to rain down upon their heads. They never came. Murphy was intervening on the union’s side—because he owed his office to the UAW’s get-out-the-vote effort for him the previous November. This was an enormous lesson, the same lesson learned by Denison Kitchel, and Reuther was among the first labor leaders to grasp it: now the real battles were to be fought and won in the political arena. Previous labor leaders jealously guarded their independence from government. But Reuther rose by combining old-school shop-floor organizing, legislative-floor politicking to create a friendly legal climate, and precinct work to elect the politicians that believed in Walter Reuther’s grand left-wing vision, inherited from his father, that business, labor, and government, working together, could more rationally run industries than could private enterprise alone. He never saw his dream fulfilled. But with more and more labor-friendly politicians in Washington and the state capitals willing to back him up, he did manage to negotiate the most splendid contracts—and some of the most liberal laws—American workers had ever won. And that, to his enemies, was bad enough.

There would have likely not been much of a conservative movement without him as catalyst. The audience for sweaty appeals for isolationist anticommunism was shrinking with every passing month. The fight against Reuther, on the other hand, was one that everyone who owned a business—and everyone who aspired to owning a business—could understand. And the timing was propitious. In the South, the struggle against the civil rights carpetbaggers was also turning moderates into conservatives.

Shadegg gently chided his issues-minded boss: “People have short memories in politics.” He might have added that many of the voters had no memory at all.

Then the United Auto Workers at their annual meeting in Miami announced that their number one political objective for the year was beating Barry Goldwater. And Shadegg had his campaign: Eastern labor bosses telling Arizonans who their representatives should be.

Only in Arizona was 1958 a Republican year. Paul Fannin, a political neophyte whom Goldwater called the worst speaker he had ever heard, became one of two new Republican governors (Nelson Rockefeller of New York was the other). Johnny Rhodes once more won reelection to Congress. And Goldwater scored a come-from-behind upset, carrying eleven of fourteen counties and 56 percent of the vote.

The Manionites’ conservatism was a conservatism of fear. They harped endlessly on the “communistic income tax,” how the economy would be decimated by inflation every time workers got a raise. (Taft Republicans, joked The Nation, feared “only God and inflation.”) Their scapegoats were unnamed subversives who were invisibly destroying the system from within: “I am at a loss to understand the current public attitude deflating the inflation psychology,” Fred Koch wrote in a self-published pamphlet. “perhaps it is propaganda, of which we have been fed much of late—pink propaganda, in as much as, in my opinion, Russia’s first objective is to destroy our economy through inflation.” Politically the philosophy lost when it won: if you removed the fear of subversion by catching subversives, you ended the fear that brought you to power in the first place—although, of course, you could never catch all the subversives, for the conspiracy was a bottomless murk, a hall of mirrors, a menace that grew greater the more it was flushed out.

Conscience of a Conservative didn’t blame invisible Communists for America’s problems. It blamed all-too-visible liberals. Its anticommunism was not about raising nameless dreads but about fighting—hard and in the open. America, said Conscience, was not losing the Cold War because of Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, or the striped-pants diplomats of the State Department. The enemy was in the mirror. “A craven fear of death is entering the American consciousness.” It ′′repudiates everything that is courageous and honorable and dignified in the human being. We must—as the first step toward saving American freedom—affirm the contrary view and make it the cornerstone of our foreign policy: that we would rather die than lose our freedom.”

National Review rode an impressive postwar tide of conservative intellectual work that, wrote an observer, “would tax the dialectical agility of a thirty-third degree Trotskyite.” They believed that the bulwark of any civilization was not industry or riches or men under arms, but ideas. The West was imperiled because it was infected by error: by materialism, in the philosophical sense of the word, believing the world to be wholly composed of ordinary physical matter and of valuing physical well-being as an ultimate end. And materialism’s handmaids: humanism and egalitarianism, which assumed man had unlimited power to order his own world; pragmatism, which said whatever worked was right; and utopianism, the doomed attempt to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth (Buckley liked to call that “immanentizing the eschaton”).

A history professor named John Higham had recently published an article in the liberal magazine Commentary called “The Cult of American Consensus: Homogenizing Our History.” In it, he complained that his colleagues were unaccountably bleaching out all the conflict in the American past—as if such conflicts weren’t important to the story at all. He watched, surprised, as those colleagues proudly claimed the epithet “consensus historians” for themselves. Conflict in America, in those rare moments it occurred, was an epiphenomenon, they argued—a footnote, in the past as much as the present. The political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset published a book called Political Man whose final chapter, “The End of Ideology,” reported that domestic politics were now “boring” because “the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved.” It was a nice idea—and, since no one paid much attention to what politically active kids under the age of thirty were doing, it was catching.

Welch urged members to join the local PTA and “go to work to take it over.”

Since McCarthy’s day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intelligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the “repeal of industrialism,” said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were industrialists). The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were afraid of internal Communist takeover because the government had been telling them to be afraid—at least since 1947, when George F. Kennan argued in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the founding document of U.S. Cold War doctrine, excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that “exhibitions of indecision, disunity, and internal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement.” Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakia, he said, “they controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled the country.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy told a 1961 press conference, “Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever been.” (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits saw films like Red Nightmare, narrated by Jack Webb, which depic...

It shouldn’t have been surprising that the John Birch Society was able to win a membership in the tens of thousands in an officially encouraged atmosphere of fear and suspicion. The John Birch Society was also a voice for conservatism—its motto was “Less government and more responsibility”—at a time when the Republican Party was turning more liberal. At a time when a housewife from suburban New York, Betty Friedan, was writing a book arguing that the alienation and boredom of housewives was America’s “problem that has no name,” the Society gave housewives world-historic purpose to their lives. (“I just don’t have time for anything,” one told a Time magazine interviewer. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”) And last but not least, being a Bircher was fun.

James Wallace soon formed Anaheim’s first chapter of the John Birch Society. (Robert Welch, he said, “awakened us out of our selfish apathy and indifference to what is happening in America.”) Soon there were five chapters in Anaheim, and thirty-eight in Orange County. In January of 1961 Orange County State College and Fullerton Evening Junior College announced a series of lectures, “Understanding the Goals and Techniques of World Communism.” The course was promptly oversubscribed, as was Santa Ana College political science instructor John G. Schmitz’s course “Communist Aggression.” In March a coalition of civic leaders hosted a rally by the barnstorming Australian minister Fred C. Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (whose unique contribution to right-wing discourse was to draw on his background in disease pathology and to contend that the Communist Party held sway over the people of Russia via “the techniques of animal husbandry”). The publicity for Schwarz’s event warned of “communist plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973.” Principals were urged to suspend school; seven thousand children were obligingly trooped off to attend the all-day affair. Soon the ninety thousand parents of the Garden Grove School District were sent flyers assuring them that their children recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, in schools where “any type of propaganda in conflict with county, state, and national laws is prohibited.” And on April 18, 19...

The men who led their families on weekends to Knott’s Berry Farm as if to secular worship were like Walter Knott’s boysenberries: in a way not quite apparent to the naked eye, they were welfare cases. Veterans who returned home from World War II to a country terrified of sinking back into depression benefited mightily from federal schemes to boost consumer spending by subsidizing homeownership; before the war, a typical mortgage required a down payment of 50 percent and came due in ten years; now a mortgage involved a down payment of 10 percent, was financed at 4 percent, lasted three decades, and was tax deductible—one of the most generous redistributions of wealth in American history. The irrigation projects that were the lifeline of the arid region were funded by taxes from the forty-nine other states. People like James Wallace cursed Washington at John Birch Society meetings after spending their days inside firms built lock, stock, and barrel with government contracts and after earning their engineering degrees in California’s tuition-free, state-run university system, or buying them with GI Bill money. They delighted in Ronald Reagan’s sparkling professions of free-market faith. But even his faith had its limits. When Reagan began saying that the Tennessee Valley Authority drained the U.S. Treasury better than its own basin, he was reminded that G.E. had a $50 million bid in for TVA generators. Reagan gladly dropped the reference.

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.” This language would become influential in Republican presidential campaigning—seven years hence. In 1961 Goldwater made no attempt to build a coalition around these ideas or shepherd the statement’s clauses into bills; soon he dropped them.

They all boiled down to one of two options: surrender or nuclear war. They differed only in the number of steps it took to get there. A nuclear first strike was considered, then the pulverization of a Hiroshima-sized Russian city at the first sign of a Soviet move. Dean Acheson told Kennedy that America should be put on immediate footing for total war, including wage and price controls. Finally, at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannisport, an initial course of action was decided upon. The gambit would be a speech, delivered on television on July 25. It was the most terrifying of the Cold War. Later Barry Goldwater would say the same kinds of things during the 1964 presidential campaign, and people would call him a madman.

In the space of an evening the end of the world became routine business. The bomb shelter—only recently the province of neighborhood eccentrics—was now presidential mandate. Thomas J. Watson of IBM gave his employees $1,000 loans to build them; the Rabbinical Council of America recommended construction of bomb shelters beneath all new synagogues. New companies sprang up: Acme Bomb and Fallout Shelter Company, Peace-O-Mind Shelter Company, Nuclear Survival Company. Specialized products appeared on shelves: “Foam-Ettes—the Toothpaste Tablet You Can Use ANYTIME, ANYWHERE—WHEREVER YOU ARE, even in a family fallout shelter.”

The grim trade illuminated dark corners of the American psyche. An article called “Gun Thy Neighbor” in Time reported on a suburban Chicagoan who planned to mount a machine gun on the hatch of his shelter, and described a civil defense coordinator for Riverside County in southern California who recommended that families stock survival kits with pistols to ward off Angelenos who might head for the sticks. The article appeared in Time’s religion section. Its main point was that religious leaders were sanctioning this kind of thing. “If you allow a tramp to take the place of your children in your shelter, you are in error,” said the dean of a Baptist seminary. “A Christian has the obligation to ensure the safety of those who depend on him.” Jesuit father L. C. McHugh branded as “misguided charity” the refusal to repel invaders by “whatever means to effectively deter their assault.”

The near miss was a hinge in the history of the Cold War. “Now we have a problem in making our power credible,” Kennedy told James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times, “and Vietnam is the place.” Kennedy meant that it was the safest place: one could signal resolve to draw the line against Communist aggression in a land so godforsaken that neither the Soviets nor China would ever risk escalation over it—escalation that could only lead, inexorably, to nuclear war. It was one of those secrets that only the President and a few of his closest advisers were allowed to know: amidst all the bluster, the only Cold War option conscience truly allowed was local, limited war.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk agreed, with one eye on the Goldwater boom: losing Vietnam “would stimulate bitter domestic controversies in the United States and would be seized upon by extreme elements to divide the country and harass the administration.”

In 1956 Army psychiatrist William E. Mayer released a report, which became a media sensation, that Korean War POWs had been brainwashed with alarming ease because they had been sent out into the field with a profound lack of understanding of the meaning of America.

Kennedy spoke often in these absolutist, apocalyptic terms; he had done so in his inaugural when he asked Americans to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship,” and all the rest. Vigilantism of some sort was perhaps an understandable result. Kennedy’s rhetoric now haunted him. Eisenhower’s farewell address had been prophetic: a permanent sense of Cold War emergency was indeed giving birth to “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties” to a citizenry wracked with “imbalance and frustration.” There had been scores of threats on Kennedy’s life already. Thirty-four had come from Texas. And when the next disturbing right-wing rally was held in Dallas, Kennedy chose to act.

Discerning observers were beginning to notice that the American right was coming to comprise two circles. Each was of roughly the same size, expanding at about the same rate; each intersected the other. And each, somehow, defined Barry Goldwater as its center. It was becoming increasingly clear to National Review that such a situation was no more viable in politics than it was in geometry. Buckley and Company set out to claim the Goldwater movement for themselves—and wrench it away from those who believed that the Communists were ready to blow up state capitols.

Abraham Lincoln’s party was formed in the 1850s to fight the spread of slavery, and also to fight for something: the ideal that would later be called liberal capitalism—every man making the best for himself through his own hard work, every farmhand aspiring to be a farmer, every factory hand aspiring to own a factory. On this much the Republican homesteaders of the West and the industrialists and artisans in the East could agree. America prospered under Republican rule through the Gilded Age. But the Republicans themselves split. The Easterners desired, and got, high tariff walls that protected their manufactures from foreign competition. The Midwesterners—beholden to the Easterners for credit to buy machinery and finance mortgages, to their railroads to bring their goods to market—wanted free trade. In later years the issues would change. The split endured. As Eastern entrepreneurs became an Eastern Establishment, they came to prefer a settled economic order to a wide-open one; as America became an equal partner with Europe, the Eastern business titans became free-trade internationalists. Their noblesse oblige gave way to a taste for liberal reform. Republicans in the heartland, meanwhile, were protectionist, isolationist, and laissez-faire. Each faction decried the other’s monopoly in party councils. Here, too, both sides were right: Midwesterners sent a powerful obstructionist bloc of conservative congressmen to the Capitol; Wall Streeters got the presidential nominees ...

marked “ADDRESS UNKNOWN.” Meanwhile the Republicans kept losing. Liberals said it was because the congressional Old Guard scared the majority of voters, who liked the New Deal, and they quoted Al Smith: “No one shoots Santa Claus.” Conservatives, meanwhile, said that Republican presidential candidates lost because millions of disgusted heartlanders stayed home rather than vote for so unnatural a beast as the “me-too Republican.” The distrust reached a peak at the 1952 Republican National Convention. On its eve, Taft controlled enough delegates to win. Tom Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Herbert Brownell—the “Wrecking Crew of ’52” to conservatives—who had manufactured the candidacy of General Eisenhower (who entered the race out of fear that isolationism would gain sway in the country) rammed through a phony “fair play” resolution that let them uncredential a number of key Southern Taft delegations. Taft’s loyal army entered the hall singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and left decrying the steal of the century. With Ike’s retirement and Nixon’s razor-thin loss in 1960 just behind them, the old feuds festered worse than ever. “The Republican Party is just a little bit pregnant with New Dealism,” Senator Jenner told Indiana convention delegates in 1960, “and you ladies know you can’t be just a little bit pregnant.”

He proceeded to make what might have been the most portentously rash decision in the history of the American presidency: he decided to go on television that very night to introduce his civil rights bill to the nation. His aides remonstrated that there was no time to write a speech. He brushed them off. There was little calculation in his decision, little more in the outpouring of untutored emotion from the President that the American people saw on television that night. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said that June 11. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” Can we say to the world, he asked, “that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes?” No President had said anything like it since Abraham Lincoln. In Jackson, Mississippi, an NAACP official coordinating a voter registration campaign—nonconfrontationally, self-consciously counterpoised to the supposed violence-provoking style of Martin Luther King—returned home from his evening’s work well past midnight, as his family eagerly waited to tell him about the astonishing speech they had just witnessed on TV. Before he could make it to the door, Medgar Evers lay facedown in a pool of his own blood. His assassination rang in another week of violent civil rights demonstrations, ...

More and more Americans, in fact, were beginning to look at politics as Martin Luther King did—and as Barry Goldwater, Michael Harrington, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, and Betty Friedan did—as a theater of morality, of absolutes. “You’re either for us or you’re against us,” a right-wing Orange County electronics executive told Time. “There’s no middle ground anymore.” Even moderates were becoming militant; they militated against extremism. “The mediator needs to become a gladiator,” University of California president Clark Kerr said in a Harvard lecture published as an influential book, The Uses of the University, for “when the extremists get in control ... the ‘delicate balance of interests’ becomes an actual war.”

Nobody seemed to worry over the fact that Goldwater’s momentum rose the more the peace was disturbed.

As early as his 1922 book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann had come to believe that the world was so complex that political decisions would best be left to a specialized class of experts. Three years later the Scopes “monkey trial” confirmed his conviction that a public uninstructed by expert opinion would succumb to the tyranny of the majority—the very worst tyranny of all. Ideologically, the columnist vacillated from decade to decade, sometimes coming out liberal in foreign affairs and conservative in domestic, sometimes vice versa. But always, always, his thinking betrayed a constant: that he and his fellow pundits—Hindi for “wise men,” a title first given to him by an admiring Henry Luce—were the nation’s best defense against the terror of the mob.

“The most essential criterion for judging the events of our time,” Arendt had written elsewhere, was “Will it lead to totalitarian rule or not?” What led to totalitarian rule, it seemed to most educated Americans, was when an extraordinary man, bound by the same limited moral horizon as everyone else, became swept up in the act of anointing himself a nation’s redeemer.

That was the subject of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King’s Men (1946): the story of a rootless man (named Burden) who heals his alienation by filling himself with devotion for a charismatic strongman modeled after Louisiana governor Huey Long, then frees himself over the course of the story from what he increasingly realizes is an existential horror. Warren had Burden exclaim, “There is nothing like the roar of a crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing which is in every man in the crowd but is not himself.” Teddy White, in The Making of the President 1960, used similar language in pondering a delirious moment at the 1960 Democratic Convention: “If demonstrations and noise alone can sway a national decision at a nerve center of national politics,” he wrote, “then American politics could be reduced to that naked violence that has so frequently and tragically swayed the history of France and Germany.” That the object of the crowd’s roar was hardly führer material—quiet, cerebral Adlai Stevenson—hardly mattered. After Hitler, the crowd’s roar was frightening enough in itself.

those who, in the conviction that theirs is the only right view, have lost sight of—and faith in—the fundamental processes of self-government. They claim to have the one true answer to every problem. They talk of setting aside the law when the law offends them. They are quick to cry “treason,” slow to admit error, and indifferent to arguments and facts that do not support their beliefs. They are not really leftists or rightists—but simply anarchists.

The newspaper hit the streets as H. L. Hunt, whose son had helped bankroll the ad, took to the radio in full-throated bray to predict that Kennedy’s next move after passing the civil rights bill would be revoking the right to bear arms. “In dictatorships,” he said, “no firearms are permitted, because they would then have the weapons with which to rise up against their oppressors.”

With business help, his district got the largest rural electrical cooperative in the country (Washington remitted $14 million in four years for the dams), four new hospitals, an air base, a highway. Lyndon Johnson, unlike the young department store owner in Arizona, saw no reason to resent the Southwest’s special relationship with the federal government.

Wheeling and dealing, for him, was nearly the sum of politics. Ideologues baffled him. Under Johnson, the Senate was a machine for getting things done and bringing people together, not for making lots of partisan noise. So, Lyndon Johnson was determined, would be his presidency.

Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place. In this case, the villain became the man chasing around New Hampshire talking incessantly of “another Pearl Harbor” unless we commissioned new nuclear bombers, distributed tactical nuclear weapons to our allies, and returned to John Foster Dulles’s “brinkmanship” policy. The man, in other words, who did what ordinary politicians avoided wherever possible: reminded America that it coexisted with the power to destroy itself. For the sin, more and more people began viewing Barry Goldwater as an outright menace.

It had been a busy winter for George Wallace. There was Alabama to keep segregated, for one thing. There was his ego to attend to, for another.

The heavy hitters thought they knew what to expect of Republican convention delegates: hacks, in the main, often serving “uncommitted” at the sufferance of some boss whose support was up for sale. But Goldwater delegates were freedom fighters, not mercenaries.

They received standing ovations from thirty members—and stony silence from the other seventy. Sixteen years earlier Henry Cabot Lodge had chaired this committee. Now he was being treated like an alien. He returned to the Mark Hopkins, made his way through the gilded, mirrored—and, this week, mobbed—lobby to the elevator, and found himself accosted by a raving Goldwaterite: “I voted for you in 1960, but never again. You’re terrible!” Lodge shot back, “You’re terrible, too.” He repaired to his suite, leafed through the roll of delegates, and cried, “What in God’s name has happened to the Republican Party! I hardly know any of these people!”

In The Making of the President 1960, Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, a politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB found nothing to lament in the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to know about a product, which in this case happened to be a human being, in half a minute—the speed not of thought but of emotion.

Kitchel, Baroody, and Goldwater didn’t bother to attend the Sunday strategy meetings. They made strategy at 33,000 feet. The campaign plane (“YIA BI KEN” [House in the Sky], read the legend above the lightning stripe running down its side) was their playhouse: Kitchel, Karl Hess, and the candidate conversed in Navajo (Hess was studying up), swapped ribald jokes, told hunting stories, yapped on the airborne ham radio. Another favorite pastime was refusing to receive top donors on board for a chance to ride along with the candidate. Occasionally, they prepared for the next stop, although that didn’t take much time: Goldwater never acknowledged the locale he landed in anyway. Meanwhile the leaders on the second floor would explode once more after learning from the morning newspapers that their hard-won intelligence, relayed so assiduously by all those expensive contraptions, had been ignored while their underlings floundered, directionless, bickering, confused, because the man charged with directing them, Kitchel, was otherwise disposed.

These sturdy proletarians took in the words like a comforting balm. Property values, seniority systems, busing: after facing their planet’s mortality, these things seemed like chickenshit indeed.